Wilkie Collins

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Wilkie Collins

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English

English people

The English are a nation and ethnic group native to England who speak English language in England. The English identity as a people is of early medieval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Anglecynn....
novelist, playwright

Playwright

A playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes dramatic literature or drama. These works may be written specifically to be performed by actors or they may be closet dramas or literary works written using dramatic forms but not meant for performance....
, and author

Author

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Quotations

Men ruin themselves headlong for unworthy women.

Man and Wife (1870) Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 0-192-83696-X, vol. II, ch. XLI: The Sacrifice of Herself (p. 385)

Encyclopedia

William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 – 23 September 1889) was an English

English people

Playwright

Author

An author is defined both as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created....
of short stories. He was hugely popular in his time, and wrote 27 novels, more than 50 short stories, at least 15 plays, and over 100 pieces of non-fiction work. His best-known works are The Woman in White
The Woman in White (novel)

The Woman in White is an epistolary novel written by Wilkie Collins in 1859, Serial ized in 1859?1860, and first published in book form in 1860....
, The Moonstone
The Moonstone

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century United Kingdom epistolary novel, generally considered the first detective novel in the English language....
, Armadale
Armadale (novel)

Armadale by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century semi-Epistolary novel novel. Some chapters consist of letters between the various characters, while other chapters record the events as the characters perceive them....
and No Name
No Name (novel)

No Name by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century Illegitimacy in fiction. It was originally serialized in Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round before book publication....
.

Life

Collins was born in London

London

London is the capital of both England and the United Kingdom, and the most populous municipality in the European Union. An important settlement for two millennia, History of London goes back to its founding by the Roman Empire....
, the son of a well-known Royal Academician

Royal Academy

The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London, England. As an academy, it functions to encourage British art, and has a membership of practising artists....
landscape artist, William Collins

William Collins (painter)

William Collins was a British landscape and genre painter.Collins was a highly successful artist, whose work was better known in his day than that of his rival John Constable....
. Named after his father, he swiftly became known by his second name (which honoured his godfather, David Wilkie

David Wilkie (artist)

File:David Wilkie.jpgSir David Wilkie was a Scotland Painting....
). From the ages of 12-15 (19 September 1836 – 15 August 1838) he lived with his parents in Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic , is a country located on the Italian Peninsula in Southern Europe and on the two largest islands in the Mediterranean Sea, Sicily and Sardinia....
, which made a great impression on him. At the age of 17 he left school and was apprenticed as a clerk

Clerk

Clerk, the vocational title, commonly refers to a white-collar worker who conducts general office or, in some instances, sales tasks. The responsibilities of clerical workers commonly include record keeping, filing, staffing service counters and other administrative tasks....
to a firm of tea merchants, but after five unhappy years, during which he wrote his first novel, Iolani, he entered Lincoln's Inn

Lincoln's Inn

The Honourable Society of Lincoln's Inn is one of four Inns of Court in London to which barristers of England and Wales belong and where they are Call to the bar....
to study law. (Iolani remained unpublished for over 150 years until 1999.) After his father's death in 1847, Collins produced his first published book, Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A. (1848), and also considered a career in painting, exhibiting a picture at the Royal Academy summer exhibition

Royal Academy summer exhibition

The Summer Exhibition is an open art exhibition held annually by the Royal Academy in Burlington House, Piccadilly in central London during the summer months of July and August....
in 1849, but it was with the publication of his first published novel Antonina in 1850 that his career as a writer began in earnest.

An instrumental event in Collins' career occurred in March 1851 when he was introduced to Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens, Royal Society of Arts , pen-name "Boz", was the most popular English people novelist of the Victorian era, as well as a vigorous Reform movement....
by a mutual friend, Augustus Egg. They became lifelong friends and collaborators. Collins became an editor of Dickens' "Household Words

Household Words

Household Words was an English weekly magazine edited by Charles Dickens which took its name from the line from Shakespeare "Familiar in his mouth as household words" ? Henry V ....
", several of Collins' novels were serialized in Dickens' weekly publication All the Year Round
All the Year Round

All the Year Round was a Victorian literature periodical, being a United Kingdom weekly literary magazine founded and owned by Charles Dickens, published between 1859 and 1895 throughout the United Kingdom....
, and Dickens later edited and published them himself. Collins' younger brother Charles Allston married Dickens' younger daughter Kate. Collins also advised Dickens's sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth

Georgina Hogarth

Georgina Hogarth was the sister-in-law, housekeeper and adviser of England novelist Charles Dickens and the editor of two volumes of his collected letters after his death....
, when she was editing The Letters Of Charles Dickens From 1833 To 1870 (published in 1880) with Dickens's daughter Mary Angela Dickens. Collins suffered from a form of arthritis

Arthritis

Arthritis is a group of conditions involving damage to the joints of the body. Arthritis is the leading cause of disability in people older than fifty-five years....
known as 'rheumatic gout' and became severely addicted to the opium

Opium

Opium is a narcotic formed from the latex released by lacerating the immature seed pods of Opium poppy . It contains up to 12% morphine, an opiate alkaloid, which is most frequently processed chemically to produce heroin for the illegal drug trade....
that he took (in the form of laudanum

Laudanum

Laudanum , also known as opium tincture or tincture of opium, is an alcoholic Herbalism of opium. It is made by combining ethanol with opium latex or powder....
) to relieve the pain. As a result he experienced paranoid delusions, the most notable being his conviction that he was constantly accompanied by a subjective doppelgänger

Syndrome of subjective doubles

The syndrome of subjective doubles is a rare delusional misidentification syndrome in which a person suffers from the delusion that he or she has a double or doppelganger with the same appearance, but usually with different character traits and leading a life of its own....
he dubbed 'Ghost Wilkie'. His novel The Moonstone
The Moonstone

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century United Kingdom epistolary novel, generally considered the first detective novel in the English language....
prominently features the effects of opium and opium addiction. While he was writing it, Collins' consumption of laudanum was such that he later claimed to have no memory of writing large parts of the novel.

Collins never married, but lived, on and off from 1858, with a widow, Mrs. Caroline Graves, and her daughter, Elizabeth (whom Collins called "Carrie"). He also fathered three children by another woman, Martha Rudd (Marian, 4 July 1869; Harriet, 14 May 1871; William Charles, 25 December 1874), whom he met after Mrs. Graves left him to marry Joseph Charles Clow on 29 October 1868. Mrs. Graves returned to Collins after two years, and he continued both relationships until his death in 1889.

He is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery

Kensal Green Cemetery

Kensal Green Cemetery is a burial ground located in Kensal Green, London, England. It was immortalised in the lines of GK Chesterton "For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen; Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green"....
, West London. His grave notes him as the author of The Woman in White
The Woman in White (novel)

The Woman in White is an epistolary novel written by Wilkie Collins in 1859, Serial ized in 1859?1860, and first published in book form in 1860....
. Grave Number 31754, Square 141, Row 1.

Wilkie Collins is the main protagonist in the 2009 historical novel Drood

Drood (novel)

Drood is a 2009 novel written by Dan Simmons. It is based in part on Charles Dickens The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The protagnist is Wilkie Collins and the novel takes the form of memoirs written by him....
by Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons

Dan Simmons is an United States author most widely known for his Hugo Award-winning science fiction series, known as the Hyperion Cantos, and for his Locus-winning Ilium/Olympos cycle....
. The book concerns based in part on Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

The Mystery of Edwin Drood

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is the final novel by Charles Dickens. The novel was left unfinished work at the time of Dickens' death and thus what happened to the titular character remains a real mystery....
.

Works

His works were classified at the time as 'sensation novel

Sensation novel

The sensation novel was a literary genre of fiction popular in Great Britain in the 1860s and 1870s, following on from earlier melodramatic novels and the Newgate novels, which focused on tales woven around criminal biographies....
s', a genre seen nowadays as the precursor to detective fiction

Detective fiction

Detective fiction is a branch of crime fiction in which a detective , either professional or amateur, investigate a crime, usually murder. Detective fiction is the most popular form of both mystery fiction and hardboiled crime fiction....
and suspense fiction. He also wrote penetratingly on the plight of women and on the social and domestic issues of his time. Like many writers of his time, he published most of his novels as serial

Serial (literature)

The term "serial" refers to the intrinsic property of a succession — namely, its sequence. In literature, the term is used as a noun to refer to a format by which a story is told in contiguous installments in sequential issues of a single periodical publication....
s in magazine

Magazine

for quarterly in Heraldry see Quartering Magazines, periodicals, glossies or serials are publications, generally published on a regular schedule, containing a variety of Article , generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscription, or all three....
s such as Dickens's All the Year Round
All the Year Round

All the Year Round was a Victorian literature periodical, being a United Kingdom weekly literary magazine founded and owned by Charles Dickens, published between 1859 and 1895 throughout the United Kingdom....
, and was known as a master of the form, creating just the right degree of suspense to keep his audience reading from week to week. (Sales of All The Year Round actually increased when The Woman in White followed A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities is a novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. It depicts the plight of the French proletariat under the brutal oppression of the France aristocracy in the years leading up to the revolution, and the corresponding savage brutality demonstrated by the revolutionaries t...
.)

He enjoyed ten years of great success following publication of The Woman in White in 1859. His next novel, No Name
No Name (novel)

No Name by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century Illegitimacy in fiction. It was originally serialized in Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round before book publication....
combined social commentary - the absurdity of the law as it applied to children of unmarried parents (see illegitimacy) - with a densely-plotted revenge thriller. Armadale
Armadale (novel)

Armadale by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century semi-Epistolary novel novel. Some chapters consist of letters between the various characters, while other chapters record the events as the characters perceive them....
, the first and only of Collins' major novels of the 1860s to be serialised in a magazine other than Dickens' All the Year Round
All the Year Round

All the Year Round was a Victorian literature periodical, being a United Kingdom weekly literary magazine founded and owned by Charles Dickens, published between 1859 and 1895 throughout the United Kingdom....
, provoked strong criticism, generally centered upon its transgressive villainess Lydia Gwilt; and provoked in part by Collins's typically confrontational preface. The novel was simultaneously a financial coup for its author and a comparative commercial failure: the sum paid by Cornhill
Cornhill Magazine

The Cornhill Magazine was a Victorian literature magazine and literary journal named after Cornhill, London Street in London.Cornhill was founded by George Murray Smith in 1860 and was published until 1975....
for the serialisation rights was exceptional, eclipsing the prices paid for the vast majority of similar novels by a substantial margin, yet the novel itself failed to recoup its publishers' investment. The Moonstone
The Moonstone

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century United Kingdom epistolary novel, generally considered the first detective novel in the English language....
, published in 1868, and the last novel of what is generally regarded as the most successful decade of its author's career, was, despite a somewhat cool reception from both Dickens and the critics, a significant return to form and reestablished the market value of an author whose success in the competitive Victorian literary marketplace had been gradually waning in the wake of his first "masterpiece." Viewed by many to represent the advent of the detective story within the tradition of the English novel, The Moonstone remains one of Collins's most critically acclaimed productions.

However, various factors (most often cited is the death of Dickens in 1870 and thus the loss of his literary mentoring; Collins's increased dependence upon laudanum

Laudanum

Laudanum , also known as opium tincture or tincture of opium, is an alcoholic Herbalism of opium. It is made by combining ethanol with opium latex or powder....
; and a somewhat ill-advised penchant for using his fiction to rail against social injustice

Social injustice

Social Injustice is a concept relating to the perceived unfairness or justice of a society in its divisions of rewards and burdens. The concept is distinct from those of justice in law, which may or may not be considered moral in practice....
s) appear to have led to a decline in the two decades following the success of his sensation novels of the 1860s. His novels and novellas of the '70s and '80s, whilst by no means entirely devoid of merit or literary interest, are generally regarded as inferior to his previous productions and receive comparatively little critical attention today.

The Woman in White and The Moonstone share an unusual narrative structure, somewhat resembling an epistolary novel

Epistolary novel

An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is Letter s, although diary, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used....
, in which different portions of the book have different narrators, each with a distinctive narrative voice (Armadale
Armadale (novel)

Armadale by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century semi-Epistolary novel novel. Some chapters consist of letters between the various characters, while other chapters record the events as the characters perceive them....
has this to a lesser extent through the correspondence between some characters). The Moonstone, being the most popular of Collins's novels, is known as a precursor for detective fiction such as Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who first appeared in publication in 1887. He is the creation of Scotland-born author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle....
.

After The Moonstone, Collins's novels contained fewer thriller elements and more social commentary. The subject matter continued to be "sensational", but his popularity declined. Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, controversial in his own day....
commented: "What brought good Wilkie's genius nigh perdition? Some demon whispered - 'Wilkie! have a mission.'"

Bibliography

See also::Category:Novels by Wilkie Collins and :Category:Wilkie Collins plays

Iolani, or Tahiti as it was. A Romance (written 1844; published 1999)
Memoirs of the Life of William Collins, Esq., R.A. (1848)
Antonina (1850)
Rambles Beyond Railways (1851)
Basil (1852)
Mr Wray's Cash Box (1852)
Hide and Seek (1854)
The Ostler (1855)
After the Dark (1856)
The Dead Secret (1857)
A Rogue's Life (1857/1879)
The Frozen Deep
The Frozen Deep

The Frozen Deep was a play, originally staged as an amateur theatrical, written by Wilkie Collins along with the substantial guidance of Charles Dickens....
(1857), a play co-written with Charles Dickens
A Terribly Strange Bed (1858)
A House to Let
A House to Let

"A House to Let" is a short story by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter. It was originally published in 1858 in the Christmas edition of Dickens' Household Words magazine....
(1858), a short story co-written with Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter
The Queen of Hearts (1859)
The Woman in White
The Woman in White (novel)

The Woman in White is an epistolary novel written by Wilkie Collins in 1859, Serial ized in 1859?1860, and first published in book form in 1860....
(1860)
No Name
No Name (novel)

No Name by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century Illegitimacy in fiction. It was originally serialized in Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round before book publication....
(1862)
My Miscellanies (1863)
Armadale
Armadale (novel)

Armadale by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century semi-Epistolary novel novel. Some chapters consist of letters between the various characters, while other chapters record the events as the characters perceive them....
(1866)
No Thoroughfare
No Thoroughfare

No Thoroughfare is a stage play and novel by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, both released in December 1867....
(1867), a story and play co-written with Charles Dickens
The Moonstone
The Moonstone

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century United Kingdom epistolary novel, generally considered the first detective novel in the English language....
(1868)
Man and Wife (1870)
Poor Miss Finch (1872), dedicated to Frances Minto Elliot
Frances Minto Elliot

File:Old Court Life in France - Frances Elliot.jpgFrances Minto Elliot was a prolific English people writer, primarily of non-fiction works on the social history of Italy, Spain, and France and Travel literature....
Miss or Mrs? (1873)
The New Magdalen (1873)
The Frozen Deep and Other Stories (1874)

"The Frozen Deep"
"Dream Woman"
"John Jago's Ghost; or The Dead Alive
The Dead Alive

The Dead Alive is a novel written by Wilkie Collins based on the famous Boorn Brothers murder case, reprinted with a side by side examination of the case by Rob Warden in 2005 by Northwestern Press....
"

The Law and the Lady
The Law and the Lady

The Law and the Lady was published in 1875 in literature, by Wilkie Collins, although still in print, is largely forgotten now. Not quite as Sensation novel in style as The Moonstone and The Woman in White , it is still a detective story....
(1875)
The Two Destinies (1876)
The Haunted Hotel (1878)
The Fallen Leaves (1879)
My Lady's Money (1879)
Jezebel's Daughter (1880)
The Black Robe
The Black Robe

The Black Robe is an 19th century in literature epistolary novel by famed English people writer, Wilkie Collins. The book centers around the misadventures of Lewis Romayne, and is also noted for a perceived anti-Catholic bias....
(1881)
Heart and Science (1883)
I Say No (1884)
The Ghost's Touch and Other Stories (1885)
The Evil Genius (1886)
The Guilty River (1886)
Little Novels (1887)
The Legacy of Cain (1889)
Blind Love
Blind Love

Blind Love was an unfinished novel by Wilkie Collins, which he left behind on his death in 1889. It was completed by historian and novelist Sir Walter Besant....
(1889 - unfinished. Completed by Walter Besant
Walter Besant

Sir Walter Besant , was a novelist and historian from London. His sister-in-law was Annie Besant....
)

External links

- Collins works.
at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin
University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin is a public university research university located in Austin, Texas, Texas, United States, and is the flagship#University campuses institution of University of Texas System....